SOCIALISM BY CONSENSUS

The formula for these takeovers is now well established. Funded by federal executive branch agencies and enviro groups, "stakeholder'' councils are formed in towns, counties, and regions. These supposedly grassroots efforts to address local "land use, environmental, and ecological concerns'' seem to arise spontaneously.

In fact, these events are preplanned with goals and decisions already reached before the first meetings quietly take place. After the effort is carefully populated with community "failures'' and others who think it offers personal benefit and is firmly controlled by the initiating bureaucrats, public meetings are held to give the enterprise a facade of public "input.'' Once it gets rolling, local business leaders often join -sacrificing honesty and ethics and giving credibility by their presence -in order to protect their own self-interests.

"Consensus'' enters in because all public meetings of these groups are run with the intention solely of ratifying the socialist objectives of the initiating bureaucracy. No votes are taken or other mechanisms allowed to intervene whereby the community might democratically express itself or fundamental human rights might be applied.

Alexander Poniatoff, founder of AMPEX Corporation, began his career flying a plywood airplane for the Czar in World War I and then fought with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. He told me once of his arrival back in his home town from the European front only to find the surrounding region embroiled in the Communist revolution.

A Communist commissar for his village had already been appointed. The appointed individual had previously held office as the village bum. Poniatoff said that this was a standard Communist practice. The failures of society were appointed to rule over the productive. Failures could be counted on for a maximum of envy, a minimum of ability (and therefore were unable to interfere with their controllers), and a maximum of obedience (since their only status derived from that awarded by their masters). Consensus bureaucrats likewise populate their efforts as much as possible with the lowest common denominators of the community - for similar reasons.